Heck of a First Day Back
It's been all I had hoped today would be - busy with lots of things to do, no time to sit around and wonder, and all good things to deliver to the users. I've gotten reports today of data issues that I've fixed in the market data server as well as things I noticed yesterday evening when I got a night-time call from the Hong Kong folks about F/X rates not being properly set. There were a lot of things to overcome - most of them non-obvious to the users, but it was a lot of fun hammering at them until they cracked open, and were solved.
Never give up. Never surrender. - great line from a very funny movie, and it's the way to approach these problems. You know you're going to figure it out, so let's just do it! In the end, it's been a great day. At this point I'm simply waiting on people to get back to me and waiting for others to do things for me. Not a lot I can do until they come through for me, but it's been a heck of a good day up 'til now.
Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of things that greeted me upon my return that weren't really pleasant. For instance, the network problems I've been having have simply been moved to another machine - it's clearly the wiring or the switch, but it's still taking one of my machines down a lot more than it should. Thankfully, I can control which machine this is and that's making it a lot more reasonable, but it's still a pain after all I've been through on this.
Also, there are problems that the users have been telling others about for a while and no one has mentioned them to me. I can't fix what I don't know is a problem. Simple as that. WHen I found out about it, I was able to turn out fixes for the problems pretty quickly, but there are limitations to the data sources, and even I can't get blood from a turnip.
So all in all, it's been a really good day.